The Warriors and the case for looking local
When this newsletter started last week I received a number of messages asking me to dig into the Warriors. Truth is, I haven't paid them a lot of attention in recent times. I think I know why.
As Auckland’s Level 4 lockdown crept forward by another week, increasing the prospect of a lost September (cue: Green Day’s second-best ballad* and worst video), thoughts turned to the city’s flagship league team who’ve endured inconveniences that extend beyond a month or two.
More pointedly, thoughts turned to what the Warriors should be?
The NRL playoffs are off to a dramatic and vinegary start and the Warriors are not part of it. Despite a brief late-season rally, they were never really in the picture.
The reviews came in and not many make for pretty reading. Sir Graham Lowe had a decent pop, Chris Rattue handed out his end-of-season awards in inimitable style, David Long and Marvin France went the more traditional route in Stuff, while Michael Burgess in the Herald had six burning questions that were all valid but didn’t address the one I want answered before they return to Mt Smart in (presumably) 2023: What are the Warriors?
Grant Chapman at Newshub got close when he said the wayward Warriors must rediscover their culture and connection to fans but even this salient observation skirts the fundamental question: What is their culture?
While the extraordinary circumstances around their exile affords them more credit than condemnation - a situation that will continue through 2022 - the time away from home should give management and the owner time to reflect on what they want the Warriors to look like when they return to Auckland.
The obvious answer is they want them to look like champions and to look like perennial playoff powerhouses. Easy to say, hard to do. They’ve never been champions and despite multiple coaches and approaches have rarely established themselves as anything resembling a playoff regular.
Daniel Anderson and Ivan Cleary are the only coaches to have sustained semi-success (it’s relative, right?), with the former making three successive playoffs from 2001 to ’03, including grand final in 2002, and the latter making four playoffs in five years between 2007 and ’11, including the GF in that final year**.
In 27 seasons the Warriors have made eight playoff series and won just eight playoff games. They’ve finished in the bottom half of the table 19 times and the bottom quarter in seven seasons.
They’ve played a grand total of one playoff game in the past decade, losing to Penrith 27-12 in 2018.
The reason for outlining this woe is to both point out the obvious - what they’re doing is not working - and to highlight the opportunity for meaningful change. To not rediscover a culture, but to establish one.
The Warriors killed domestic league in New Zealand. The glory days of the Fox Memorial, the national club knockout and the Rugby League Cup have long gone.
The Warriors have a debt to the 13-man sport in New Zealand it has stopped repaying. It is a privately owned operation, sure, and was invited into a domestic Australian competition, but it must hold the lantern for the local game.
During the past couple of years it has felt like the club, perhaps understandably, is more worried about how they’re perceived in Australia than they are here. Being immersed across the Tasman through no fault of their own adds to that, but so does the following.
The chief executive, Cam George, is Australian. The coach, Nathan Brown, is Australian. One assistant coach, Craig Hodges, is Australian. The other, Justin Morgan, is Australian. The club’s head of recruitment, Peter O’Sullivan, is Australian. When they sought an adviser they hired Phil Gould - as Australian as the quokka.
Of the 17 players selected to get hammered by the Gold Titans in the final round of the season, just five were New Zealand-born.
All the individuals mentioned might be league savants but that is not a list that screams out “pathways” if you’re an ambitious local coach, administrator or even player.
It is a point that was explored by Stuff, using Stacey Jones of the club’s development department as a mouthpiece to say the club was working hard to promote local talent. To create a culture that sticks, however, it has to come from key positions throughout the building, not just those wearing numbers on their backs in the weekends.
It can be dangerously jingoistic to present any argument based on a birthplace listed in a passport but in this case it points back to the BIG questions.
What are the Warriors?
What is their culture?
At the moment, I see a team that represents Auckland and New Zealand in concept only. I see it as just one of 16 NRL franchises when it should be something more.
Again, these are extraordinary times with extraordinary obstacles. The Warriors should not necessarily be judged on where they are now but what they do when they emerge from their Covid-imposed constraints, but there needs to be an urgency. By 2024 or 2025, it is likely that an 18th NRL club will be established somewhere in New Zealand. It will be after those same hearts and minds that the Warriors feel they have a mortgage on.
This fallow period should be evidence that “hard-nosed Australians”, a cliched and indefinable term created to justify dubious recruitment, are as fallible as “soft Kiwis”.
The post-Covid Warriors should re-surface as a team that puts Auckland and New Zealand talent - playing, coaching and administrative - in the centre of the room. Australians that come to the club do so because they want to be part of something radically different to the other 15, not because it’s a reclamation-project destination.
There will be several who say it will condemn the Warriors to years of losing before they get up to speed***.
To which I’d say: Have you not been watching these past 10 years?
* “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)” remains Green Day’s standard-bearer ballad.
** The Warriors best run came with Cleary, who bled Warriors, and Wayne Scurrah, who knew Auckland business inside out, as the coaching-CEO axis. Perhaps this was coincidental.
*** If you have a strong feeling on this, please flick me an email. I’m genuinely interested to know whether Warriors fans, casual or hardcore, believe the club has an obligation to New Zealand league in general, or whether its only focus should be winning and winning now.
HANDLE WITH CARE
With Roger Federer broken down and having just turned 40, and Rafa Nadal and Andy Murray being held together by Sellotape, Novak Djokovic is the last man standing to prevent what sports writers love to call “the changing of the guard”.
That process has already transpired in the women's game, highlighted by the improbable, phenomenal all-teen US Open final between Brit Emma Raducanu and Canadian Leylah Fernandez.
Raducanu won the much-closer-than-it-looks match 6-4 6-3 and had this to say about the state of her sport.
“The future of women’s tennis, and just the depth of the game right now, is so great,” said the 18 year old. “I think every single player here in the women’s draw definitely has a shot of winning any tournament.”
The Briton has been lauded for her talent, but also held up as a symbol of a multicultural ideal having been born in Canada to a Chinese mother and Romanian father and raised in south London.
The Guardian raises the interesting point that being a “symbol” places a lot of pressure on such young shoulders, when perhaps they’re best left alone to propel her tennis.
Have we ever recovered from letting Ivan Cleary go? (And by default, Nathan). We've certainly suffered from two years away from Mt Smart but there always seems to be something broken at the Club that no one has ever been able to identify. Still, they're all I've got. Lets gone Warriors.